Commission to study what’s best:
The Climate Security quest;
CO2 keeps alive
plants and animals thrive.
The end of the world? No, it’s blest.
Item: March 20, 2019. A federal judge temporarily blocked new oil lease auctions in Wyoming on Tuesday after finding the Department of the Interior “did not sufficiently consider climate change” when proposing the lease sales, The Washington Post reports.
Washington D.C. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled the government violated federal law and did not fully study the environmental impact of oil development on 300,000 acres of federal land.
Meanwhile, a massive coalition of environmental organizations, activists, and think-tank leaders signed a letter to President Donald Trump supporting the proposed Presidential Commission on Climate Security (PCCS), as well as the work of Trump climate and national security adviser Dr. William Happer of Princeton University.
A small excerpt from the letter:
It (the commission) would be charged with conducting an independent, high-level review of the Fourth National Climate Assessment and other official reports relating to climate and its implications for national security. Serious problems and shortcomings have been raised repeatedly in the past by highly-qualified scientists only to be ignored or dismissed by the federal agencies in charge of producing the reports. Among major issues that have been raised and that we hope the commission will scrutinize: the models used have assumed climate sensitivities to CO2 concentrations significantly higher than recent research warrants; the models used have predicted much more warming than has actually occurred; predictions of the negative impacts of global warming have been made based on implausible high-end emissions scenarios; the positive impacts of warming have been ignored or minimized; and surface temperature data sets have been manipulated to show more rapid warming than has actually occurred.
The letter is signed by over 150 scientists and organizations.
Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment. 